According to reports, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is planning to make a private visit to the southern Spanish region of Andalusia after a state visit which will see him meeting King Juan Carlos and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in mid-December. The visit will take him to the Alhambra in Granada, and the Cathedral of Cordoba, a converted mosque, both significant sites in Spanish history as centers of the long Moorish Islamic occupation, which was ended by the Reconquista in 1492.

Once called "the Madman of the Middle East" by US President Ronald Reagan, Gaddafi has made his peace with the West as an ally in its "war on terror." Long seen as a destabilizing factor in the Mediterranean, Mideast and Africa, Gaddafi is a "pan-Arab nationalist," who at one point dreamed of uniting "the Arab nation" under his leadership. As a leader of the hardline "rejectionist front" opposed to Palestinian concessions to Israel, Gaddafi was an ally of Syria and Iran, and his client terrorist groups ranged from the African National Congress in South Africa, to Robert Mugabe's insurrectionaries who overthrew white Rhodesia, to the Irish Republican Army. His regime was blamed for a number of terror incidents, from the murder of English policewoman Yvonne Fletcher and the bomb attack on a Berlin disco that led to a US attack on Libya, to the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Manzur Escudero, a native Spaniard who converted to Islam and who is now president of the Spanish Islamic Council, invited Gaddafi to visit the old Moorish sites.

The Libyan leader's appearance in Andalusia bring to light complex issues that lie at the very center of Europe's crisis; Gaddafi's visit to these sites of Islamic conquest are significant for historical, symbolic and political reasons. Al-Andalus (Andalusia) was the Muslim Moorish caliphate which ruled southern Spain from 711 until its final destruction, the Reconquista of 1492. (While the Moors were Arab speakers and Muslims, their ruling class was largely white, descended from Roman colonists, Germanic tribes, Berbers and Greeks from North Africa).

Because an Islamic caliphate was established there, Islamists like al-Qaeda lay claim to all of Spain. The 11-M attacks on Madrid in 2004, which killed 191 people and wounded 2,050, was carried out partly in the name of "regaining" Spain, often called "occupied land" in Islamist sermons, for Islam. Other "occupied lands" are Italy (Rome was sacked by jihadis in 846), Greece and the all of the Balkans, Hungary, Austria, France, all of the Mediterranean islands, and vast swathes of Russia and China. Gaddafi himself, albeit a comparatively secular Arab nationalist, is well known for his regional ambitions. He has openly boasted of the ongoing Islamization of Europe thanks to immigration and high birth rates among Muslims.

The role played by Spanish Muslim "converso" (convert) Manzur Escudero is also interesting. Escudero was originally a Communist, opposed to the nationalist government of Franco, but converted to Islam in 1980, founding the first official Muslim presence in Spain since 1492, with the significant name of the Society for the Return to Islam in Spain. Apart from agitating for "Muslim rights" and immigrants, Escudero's dearest cause seems to be the "right of return" for the descendants of Jews and Muslim imperialists driven out when the Spaniards took back their homeland.

Like many leftists and former leftists such as Juan Goytisolo Gay, Escudero seems to be fuelled by a hatred for his homeland. Spanish political correctness is much like the self hatred expressed in other white nations, but while political correctness only gained purchase in Western Europe in the 1960s, Spain has suffered the effects for centuries. The so-called Black Legend (la leyenda negra) has been used as psychological warfare against the Spaniards literally since the days of Columbus. Widely propounded at first by Protestant polemicists, it holds the Spaniards as uniquely evil, especially because of the Inquisition and Spain's alleged behavior towards the Indians. Newer research has shown that the claims of The Black Legend are highly overblown; for example, the earliest Black Legend proponent was Columbus lieutenant Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), whose tales of perfidy on the Spanish Main have been seriously questioned and largely dismissed as propaganda.

Still, despite the opposing narrative of La Leyenda Rosa (The Rose Legend, also called The White Legend by opponents), The Black Legend did serve as an early vehicle for a white guilt that is deeply rooted in the Spanish psyche. Part of this is seen in the tendency to lionize Moorish cultural achievements in Spain, an exercise that sees "cultural relativism" abandoned (as it usually is when attacking white civilization) in favor of absurd panegyrics in praise of Islamic advancement compared to the alleged backwardness of Christendom.

Also interesting is the interface of betrayal and Islam in Spain. The original Moorish conquest came about largely because of treason. At the time, the church, which was the only universal expression of white self awareness, was still suffering the effects of a struggle between orthodox Catholicism and Arianism, a major heresy brought about by "Judaizers" within the church who denied the orthodox concept of the divinity of Christ. Arianism claimed the allegiance of most church leaders in Spain, along with the bulk of the Visigothic ruling class. Arianism was mirrored in the Byzantine world in "iconoclasm," a movement toward a Judaizing unitarianism that undermined the Imperial system. In fact, some scholars believe that iconoclastic theology may have influenced the intellectual climate around Muhammad, providing inspiration for his religion. In Spain, reassertion of Catholic orthodoxy had political repercussions, leading to the exile of many Visigothic nobles, as well as Jews, and both groups provided support for the Islamic conquest.

The age-old struggle between the Catholic whites of Spain and the Muslim world is a deep and lasting one, reaching into the folk culture of Spain and Ibero-America alike. The famous black bean and rice dish of Cuba, moros y cristianos, refers to the black slaves of the Moors and the white Christians. And many places in Latin America are named for the struggle; San Diego (Saint James) was the patron of the Reconquista and his title was Matamoros (Moor-slayer). In fact, one of the original reasons given for the exploration of the New World (and the various feats of the Portuguese) was to deny these resources to the Muslims.

Islam is actually asserting itself in Latin America through The Black Legend. Aggressively pushing both parts of the Legend, Muslim missionaries point to the suffering of Mestizos and the lost faith of Moorish Spain to appeal to the Hispanic underclass, with some success. Jose Padilla, jailed on Islamist terror charges, is a convert to Islam. His fellow criminals in drug smuggling and people trafficking gangs like MS13 have forged links with jihadis.

Thus Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's visit to Andalusia has implications that go beyond today's "war on terror," exposing deep layers of meaning that go to the very heart of what Spain is, and who whites are as a people. The Reconquista did not end in 1492. From Kosovo and the Caucasus to the banlieues of France, the veiled Bangladeshis of Tower Hamlets and the ruins of Gound Zero, Western Civilization still faces a jihad that has confronted our people ever since the Umayyad conquests. But the "clash of civilizations" does not have to be a war of extermination, and is presently being exploited by neocons and other Zionists in particular for an agenda that will only increase the danger for the West and strengthen political Islam. The West should consider a different approach if it is to deal constructively with the Muslim world. The guiding formula should be that Islam is a threat to the West to the degree that it penetrates the Western world, through either immigration or war and terrorism. Inside the Muslim world itself, the West should be cultivating the secularist impulses found across the region.

Part of the propaganda pushed by the neocons to put the West on a collision course with Islam and deny us a chance for genuine solutions is the image of the Middle East as a uniformly Islamist, fanatical region, an impression held by millions of people whose main access to information is still the old media. In fact, many of the various ruling elites in the Mideast have the most to lose from Islamism, and are our potential allies. Many of these nations, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, were militantly pluralist and secular, and ruthlessly repressed any expression of Islamism. Shia Iran, today's bogey man, likewise staunchly opposes Islamism, which is a Sunni Muslim phenomenon, and in Afghanistan is actually a de facto ally of the United States. (The Hazara people, a Persian speaking Shia group backed by Iran, were savagely persecuted by the Sunni Taleban government). Even Saudi Arabia, whose state religion is fundamentalist Salafism, is under threat from Islamists, with Osama bin Laden their sworn enemy.

Muammar Gaddafi is a racial nationalist, part of a broad, diverse political tradition of secular, Arab nationalism that was embraced by the likes of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as by the Ba'ath ("renaissance") movement, founded by the Christian Michel Aflaq and which was the ruling ideology in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and is still dominant in Syria. (Similar non-Arab secular nationalisms flourish in modern Turkey, whose founder Kemal Ataturk laid down a strict formula of separation of mosque and state, and Turkic nationalism counterbalances Islamism across Central Asia). The secularists in the Muslim world seek to apply Western Enlightenment values (albeit often brutally), with the result that women and various religious dissident groups, even in nonsecular lands, often enjoy a level of freedom that would be surprising to those whose only source of news and analysis is the "mainstream" media. (For example, Iranian Jews, Zoroastrians and Christians are guaranteed seats in the national parliament of Iran, and women not only have the vote, but access to free birth control, while Syria's ruling caste consists of members of the tiny Alawi sect, a group hated by Sunni fundamentalists and viewed with suspicion by Shia).

For the West, the best course of action would be to halt, and then reverse, Third World immigration into Europe, in league with partners in the Muslim world. Muammar Gaddafi has already agreed to a similar proposal, as have other governments in the region, who have partnered with Europe to detain and process refugees and others heading for European shores. This could be achieved with "carrot and stick" incentives; Gaddafi was allowed back into the international fold in exchange for renouncing terrorism and agreeing to work with various Western sponsored initiatives, like the UN's Alliance of Civilizations, an anti-terrorism program, and will soon negotiate an Association Agreement as part of the European Union's European Neighbourhood Policy. Similarly, Syria and other Muslim world nations have proven to be open to co-operation with the West, especially on terrorism.

The West should also seek to cultivate secularist governments and ideologies, reversing a process which has often seen an unholy alliance between Islamists and Western intelligence agencies. Osama himself got his start as an ally of the CIA in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. David Shayler, a former officer in the UK's MI5, claimed that Gaddafi was the target of a UK intelligence assassination plot in 1996 using the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadi network with links to al-Qaeda. (In the attack several innocent people were killed). Hamas, which Israel and the United States castigate as "terrorists" despite their democratic election to power in Palestine, were orginally supported by Israel against the secularist PLO. The West continues to suffer "blowback" from former allies in the fundamentalist milieu.

But to achieve these changes, the West needs a new vision. Luckily, across Europe progressive nationalist forces are gaining ground as the old order increasingly shows itself incapable of preserving our homelands, with elements within the Establishment beginning to realize that change is something that has to happen if we are to survive as a people.